Shen Xin
Highland Embassy
A solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Shen Xin, part of We Contain Multitudes – a collaborative project in partnership with Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and LUX Scotland, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Highland Embassy brought together three projects by artist and filmmaker Shen Xin, all rooted in place and use storytelling to explore themes of migration, belonging, indigenous frameworks for languages and communities.
Bearing fruit of fondness (2025), is a film set on the Isle of Skye where Shen Xin lives and uses the leaves of a type of cotoneaster plant, which is an invasive species impacting local habitats, as a device to ground the films narrative and themes.
The second film, Solar Wheels (2024), draws on the Uyghur variation of the Wooden Horse story, using this narrative as a shared place to engage in relationship building with kindred communities.
Completing the exhibition was a new series of paintings used to illustrate a short children’s story, The child of the mountain (“རི་ཕྲུག” in Tibetan), written by Shen Xin. The story reflects on the overharvesting of caterpillar fungus in Tibet as a tale of caution and as a contemporary myth.
About Shen Xin
Shen Xin is an artist and filmmaker from Chengdu, China, who lives and works in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Their practice encompasses moving image, installation, performance, sound, and text to explore socio-political and ecological narratives of belonging and migration. Creating environments for immersive storytelling, Shen Xin challenges dominant narratives to propose alternative modes of understanding that are rooted in relation, place, and political agency.
Recent solo exhibitions include but this is the language we met in, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond (2024); one, arriving at floodplains, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2023); Brine Lake (A New Body), M HKA, Antwerp (2023) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2022); ས་་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (THE EARTH TURNED GREEN), Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2023) and Swiss Institute, New York (2022).
About 'We Contain Multitudes'
The commission marks a significant moment in We Contain Multitudes – a collaborative project that seeks to create systemic change in the Scottish visual arts sector for disabled artists, arts professionals and audiences.
We Contain Multitudes is dedicated to helping arts organisations embed anti-ableist practices and build programmes that more accurately reflect the diversity of the Scottish population. It is a process of learning – one that acknowledges the ongoing challenges and recognises that access measures alone are not enough to dismantle ableism.
Running until February 2026, each partner will generate a new commission, alongside published research to support long-term change in the sector. DCA will present a group exhibition featuring new and existing works by Andrew Gannon, Daisy Lafarge, Jo Longhurst and Nnena Kalu, while LUX Scotland will support a new commission to be presented online. The first of these commissions launches with Shen Xin’s exhibition at Collective.
This exhibition is commissioned by Collective as part of We Contain Multitudes, supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Install Images
Install image by Eoin Carey
Install image by Eoin Carey
Install image by Eoin Carey
Film still from 'Solar Wheels (2024)'